How Alan Stubbs Surprised Me And Olivia Manning Didn't

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

One of the advantages of working an afternoon/evening shift is that you don't have to sit and watch your team being knocked out of European football competition. I had recorded West Ham's defeat to Astra Giurgiu but on turning the television noticed the result in that ticker thing they have on the news channels. This has happened before but for the first time I was grateful.

No doubt tomorrow whilst travelling along the M4 to pick up my daughter I'll be treated mokked at by Astras (I've not spelt it wrongly by the way as that's in Vauxhallian).

Anyway let's chat about football by beginning with a book of jazz critism written by a poet. I know that sounds odd because it is, but bare with me.

Many years ago I bought a book of jazz articles by Philip Larkin that was originally in the Daily Telegraph. Don't remember what attracted me as I'm not really interested in poetry or jazz but suspect it was bought out of cheapness.

Well having read the book I can say that it made not a blind bit of difference to my view of either subject. But something he said about Louis Armstrong, one of the few exeptions in a good way to my jazz indifference I can recall even now.

Larkin wrote that Armstrong was not an experimenter or an innovator. He did what most jazz musicans did at that time, just a thousand times better. Alan Stubbs' 2013 autobiography How Football Saved My Life (written with Tom Bromley) is in many ways no different to most other football autobiographies except that it's the best one I've ever read.

What you realise when you read this book as it details his career and of course his battles with cancer is that Alan Stubbs has,when compared with other footballers, a quietly remarkable life. It's one of the few autobiographies I have ever read where I adnired the subject more once I'd finished it. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Which is more than I can say for The Rain Forest by Olivia Manning. A bickering couple arrive at a outpost of the British Empire in its twilight years. I feel I've read,watched or listened to this sort of thing all my life. Readable but not remarkable.

Unlike my next football book, which I won't be able to get until at least Tuesday. The next Penguin book I'll read is.

Fatima Meer - Nelson Mandela

This authorised autobiography was written, it should be remembered before he was released from jail. So it should be interesting.

Until the next time.